“Fuck ICE first, second, third, and fourth. Then worry about fucking me,” a Reddit post reads. “Immigrants of any status are my friends, neighbors, and colleagues.”
Across the internet — and in the streets — the sentiment is unavoidable, especially after a federal immigration agent shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, in Minneapolis on Saturday. The killing came just weeks after an immigration agent shot and killed another person, Renee Good, who federal officials smeared as a “domestic terrorist” with no evidence. This Reddit post’s message would fit right in in online spaces for countless hobbies, interests, and creators: anti-ICE discussions are happening everywhere from r/Military to cat subreddits. Except this time, it was posted to an adult forum.
r/MassiveCock is a subreddit that is primarily photos of users’ penises. Prior to this weekend, the forum was largely apolitical: a place for users to sext or promote their OnlyFans accounts. Over the weekend, peppered between the usual dick pics, some posts began to take an explicitly anti-ICE stance.
“How hard I get when I think about abolishing ICE,” one post reads, accompanied by a photo to demonstrate. “Sorry, I was just thinking about ICE agents rotting behind bars for the rest of their lives,” says another post with a photo.
A user who goes by tomatoe1987 posted one of the “Fuck ICE” messages in the subreddit that became one of the top submissions over the weekend. The user, who requested anonymity because he’s a private person, says he’s active in adult subreddits that he primarily uses to meet people and to show off. He told The Verge that he’s moderately politically active — always votes, has attended a few rallies — but doesn’t consider himself an activist of any kind. His Reddit account is his main platform, and he says he has zero social media in his personal life outside of it.
“ICE events have been having a devastating effect on my community, friends, and colleagues.”
“I admit I find what I did to be a little (very) silly,” he said in a message to The Verge. “There’s certainly a large element of what I did that was just to vent frustration in the only public way I could. ICE events have been having a devastating effect on my community, friends, and colleagues.”
There are several dozen “Fuck ICE” or similar posts in the subreddit as of Monday, some with hundreds of comments.
Many of the comments under tomatoe1987’s post were supportive of his anti-ICE statement, but there were, of course, complaints along the lines of “Why bring politics into sex?”
“Someone else said to me that nothing in life should feel ‘normal’ when these sorts of things are happening in our country. Even porn and sex,” he said. “All of it should make supporters of unchecked political violence and fascism uncomfortable.” He also said it was a way to reject the assumption that because he posts on “dominant, physically imposing styled subreddits” that he has certain political leanings or lacks empathy.
“I hope at least a few people that pay attention to me see that you can be ‘manly’ and still have compassion for fellow human beings,” tomatoe1987 said.
Politics and sex have always been deeply intertwined, of course, and adult content online is increasingly under attack, including via age verification laws that critics say are ineffective at keeping adult content away from minors, but that have a chilling effect on free speech and raise privacy concerns. In the UK, Reddit requires users to verify their age by uploading a selfie or a photo of their ID before they access some mature content, though users have figured out ways to bypass the verification process.
ICE has become a topic of conversation in other adult subreddits. A moderator of r/RandomActsofBlowJob (exactly what it sounds like) posted on Sunday that “Fuck ICE” was the subreddit’s “stance on what’s going on regarding immigration enforcement.” (A related subreddit also had the same stance.) There’s also been debate over the ethics of continuing to run a fascist kink subreddit in an age of violent state repression.
tomatoe1987 says he has no idea if anti-ICE content will stick in r/MassiveCock. For now it’s simply “a little bit of day to day hope,” he says. “Just letting people know that there’s a lot of people out there who are concerned about their safety and well-being.”